Risk-taking PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi steps down

Indra Nooyi has finally stepped aside as PepsiCo’s CEO. It ends a remarkable 12 years in charge and many more years inside the corporate giant.

She dared to challenge the market assumption that PepsiCo’s corporate value could only be preserved and enhanced by a reliance on sugar and defying the new responsibilities to be sustainable.

She took big risks. She defied skeptics and stockholders who just wanted good profits in any shape or form. In doing so she created greater value, both financially and morally.

She set a new trend.

As she told Thinking the Unthinkable’s founder Nik Gowing in mid-September in Singapore, she now wants to encourage corporate leaders to take risks and defy orthodoxy.

Her goodbye to staff has stirring words for what they must do to continue what she managed to achieve.

The old ways must not be the new way.

Our book Thinking the Unthinkable analyses how Indra Nooyi risked shifting PepsiCo to ‘Performance with Purpose’.

Her aim was ‘sustainable long-term growth, while leaving a positive imprint on society and the environment’.

Read our chapter PepsiCo: ‘Performance With Purpose’; How Culture Eats Strategy.